I earned my PhD in 2006 on Empirical Software Engineering Research on Free/Open Source Software (with European mention after visiting for several months the Business Univ. of Vienna, Austria, and the Univ. of Maastricht, The Netherlands). As a post-doc, I visited the University of Lincoln in 2006 and 2007 for four months, and was a visiting scholar (with a DAAD scholarship) at the Univ. Trier for three months in 2008.

From 2009, because of the international financial crisis, shortcuts in the Spanish Higher Education were implemented, and I was appointed to give 12h/week of teaching, which limited the amount of time I could devote to other activities. Since December 2014, I hold a permanent position with a lower number of lectures (4h/week) that allows me to invest more time on R&D activities.

In 2012, my research group founded a spin-off company, Bitergia, which does software analytics, and that allows me to have an overview of he software industry and its needs, especially in the Free Software/Open Source domain. Among Bitergia's customers we can find the Linux Foundation, the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, Paypal, Intel or Mozilla.

Research areas and focus

I mainly do research in following two fields:

Software engineering: I am specialized in software analytics of Open Source Software systems. My primary focus is on mining software repositories, socio-technical issues such as community metrics, software evolution, and development effort estimation.

Computational thinking (CT): I investigate the effect of using coding as a way to help students learn beyond coding. I also work on how the development of CT skills can be assessed.

As part of my research, I have developed and maintained several software tools, as CVSAnalY, a versioning system log analyzer, and Dr. Scratch, a web-based gamified computational thinking skills assessment tool. CVSAnalY has been used in more than 250 scientific publications from our and other research groups, while Dr. Scratch currently analyzes more than 5,000 Scratch projects from 3,000 distinct learners on a monthly basis.

My research has been awarded several times, including conference best paper awards (EDUCON 2016, OSS 2012, MSR 2006), a significant contribution award (MSR 2015 for our MSR 2005 paper), and a Google RISE Award (2015) due to the development of the Dr. Scratch platform.

Collaborations and Service

I have collaborated with research groups from Europe and from the rest of the world. I have participated in several, multi-million-euro European, national and regional funded research projects, among others, FLOSS (2000-2002), CALIBRE (2004-2006), co-ordinated by LERO - the Irish Software Research Centre, FLOSSMetrics (2007-2009), QualiPSO (2007-2010), or SENECA (2015-2018). In addition, besides the collaborations in my research stays, I have worked with international research groups, such as the Univ. Victoria (Canada), Chalmers and Gothemburg Univ. (Sweden), TU Eindhoven (The Netherlands), Brunel Univ. London (UK), Osaka Univ. (Japan), among others. Beyond the activity of Bitergia, I have collaborated with the software industry, e.g., Telefónica I+D, Google, or Samsung.

I have been general chair of ICSME 2018 to be held in Madrid in September 2018. I have been general chair of SATToSE 2107, programme co-chair of OSS 2016 and OSS 2017, of IWPSE 2013 and IWPSE 2015, of OpenSym 2018, and the Industry track co-chair of SANER 2017. I have been involved in many conference PCs in the last years (ICSME, MSR, SANER, OSS, among others). I am in the steering committee of the OpenSym and OSS conferences.

I have served as member of a PhD thesis evaluation committee in following countries: Spain (4 times at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and 2 times at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), France (Institut Mines Telecom, Telecom Ecole de Management, 2013), Finland (Tampere University of Technology, 2014), The Netherlands (University of Leiden, 2016, and TU Eindhoven, 2018), Belgium (University of Mons, 2016), UK (Brunel University, 2016) and Brasil (University of Sao Paulo, 2017). I have been appointed to be part of the evaluation committee of a master's thesis at Bringham Young University (USA) in 2017.

Teaching

I have given in the last 15 years over 2,500 hours of teaching on 16 different subjects, mostly in Telecommunication Engineering and Computer Science degrees (mainly subjects on multimedia networks, server-side web development and client-side web development), but also in a Journalism degree (Introduction to Computer Science, 330 hours), an on-line free-choice subject for all public universities in the Region of Madrid (Free Culture, 110 hours), and a subject taught in English (Introduction to Computer Networks, 30 hours).

My teaching quality has been recognized with three DOCENTIA -a Spanish evaluation programme that evaluates university lecturers every three years that was first implemented in 2009 in my university- positive evaluations (2006-2008 - Favorable, 2009-2011 - Excellent, 2012-2014 - Remarkable, 2015-2017 - Remarkable). Only less than 8% receive an excellent evaluation.

Spanish universities have also a procedure where students evaluate their lecturers, at the end of the term using a Likert scale from 1 to 5. I have been evaluated in a total of 64 assessment surveys by students. The average score obtained in them is 4.25 / 5. Of the 64 subjects evaluated: